Abstract

Abstract. Water resources management in Latin America and the Caribbean is particularly threatened by climatic, economic, and political pressures. To assess the region's ability to manage water resources, we conducted an unprecedented literature review of over 20 000 multilingual research articles using machine learning and an understanding of the socio-hydrologic landscape. Results reveal that the region's vulnerability to water-related stresses, and drivers such as climate change, is compounded by research blind spots in niche topics (reservoirs and risk assessment) and subregions (Caribbean nations), as well as by its reliance on an individual country (Brazil). A regional bright spot, Brazil, produces well-rounded water-related research, but its regional dominance suggests that funding cuts there would impede scientifically informed water management in the entire region.

Highlights

  • Despite being the world’s most water-rich region, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) faces extreme weather events and a range of water-related stresses that are expected to worsen with climate change (UN-OCHA, 2020)

  • We used the following four validation metrics to assess the stability of the clustering under the complete set of clustering variables and performed an iterative procedure where one variable is removed from the set, an approach akin to leave-one-out cross-validation:

  • – The average proportion (APN) measures the proportion of observations not placed in the same cluster under both cases and evaluates how robust the clusters are under cross-validation (Datta and Datta, 2003)

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Summary

Introduction

Despite being the world’s most water-rich region, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) faces extreme weather events and a range of water-related stresses that are expected to worsen with climate change (UN-OCHA, 2020). Freshwater resources face mounting pressures, brought about by human population growth and urbanization (Jenerette and Larsen, 2006; Immerzeel et al, 2020), climate change (Gosling and Arnell, 2016), economic growth and consumption patterns (Mcdonald et al, 2014; O’dorico et al, 2018), and the spread of misinformation and mistrust in science (IPCC, 2014). Countries with abundant water resources, Brazil for example, experience water scarcity due to a mismatch between water-rich areas and population centers (Formiga-Johnsson and Kemper, 2005), while others, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia for example, face flooding and melting glaciers (Barros et al, 2015; Soruco et al, 2015; Masiokas et al, 2019), yet others in Central America are increasingly devastated by hurricanes (Bárcena Ibarra et al, 2020)

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